Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The present invention relates to the analysis of business information, and in particular to automatic updates and alterations to the representation of the visual analytic data when a user requests a change to the type or number of dimensions shown.
Many types of business information are used on a daily basis by a wide variety of user types within the context of various business systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and other similar systems. For example, a typical business system may include a number of transaction and analytic databases on which an analytical engine can execute various analytical operations of a specific report definition to generate a corresponding report. Many of such databases include information in the form of business objects that include the underlying business data (i.e. transaction and analytic data). The resulting report may include the analysis of the underlying business object based on the specification of one or more dimensions in the report definition. The dimensions of a particular report definition may specify the aggregation and filtering of business information in the business object according to a number of variables. For example, a business object may be analyzed according to a report definition to generate quarterly total sales for each member of a particular sales team. Accordingly, the sales data may be filtered for sales data associated with members of the particular sales team, and then aggregated over the quarter of interest. In such scenarios, the dimensions of the report definition at least include the total sales, the employees, and the specific fiscal quarter of interest.
While the resulting report may include information that is useful to some users, the utility of the analytical data in resulting report may be increased for a wider audience of users by generating a visual representation of the analysis of the underlying business object. The visual representations, or visualizations, of the analytic data of a report typically include graphs, charts, tables, numerics, and the like. The visualizations provide quick and easily consumable representations of the analytic data that can quickly and concisely portray specific details about the underlying business objects. To further increase the accessibility of the analytic data, some systems provide simplified and concise formats for the visualization of the analytic data. For example, some systems offer dashboards user interfaces (UIs) that provide a framework in which multiple visualizations are included in pre-formatted units. The preformatted units are often referred to herein as visual analytics. The visual analytics may include one or more visualizations of analytic data of an associated business object. FIG. 1 illustrates an example dashboard UI 110 that includes multiple visual analytics 120 that include visualizations 125 of analytic data of the underlying business objects 130. The business objects 130 are represented by dotted-line boxes to indicate the association with the visual analytics 120; however, the visual analytics 120 may or may not include an indication of the underlying business objects 130.
To further increase the utility of visual analytics 120 displayed in a dashboard UI 110, some systems provide controls and tools for end-users to customize the visualization 125 of the analytic data. For example, such systems include visual analytics 120 that allow a user to increase or decrease the number of dimensions by which the analytic data is displayed in the corresponding visualizations 125. While increasing or decreasing the dimensions of some visualizations types is simple, such as is the case with adding an additional row or column in a table, adding additional dimensions to other types of visualizations, such as bar graphs or pie graphs, may not be as straightforward or result in particularly useful results. Accordingly, when a user requests an alteration of the dimensions of a particular visualization 125 for a specific visual analytic 120, some systems typically default to displaying the data in a table. Alternatively, some systems attempt to add the additional dimensions to the original visualization type that often results in cluttered and often confusing visualizations 125.
Thus, there is a need for improved systems and methods for automatically generating alternative visual analytics to improve the accessibility and clarity of visualizations of analytic data in response to requests for changes in dimensions. The present invention addresses such limitations by automatically and dynamically generating alternative visualizations.